Ancient City, Long Thought Lost at Sea, Found Buried in Greece / Old civilization may be a `time capsule' of classical Greece

John Noble Wilford, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 20, 2000

On a winter night in 373 B.C., the one-two punch of an earthquake followed by a surging tidal wave destroyed the grand old Greek city of Helike, near the Gulf of Corinth. The city was, coincidentally, a venerated center for worship of Poseidon, the god of earthquakes and the sea.

The land and the city ruins sank beneath the sea, and all the people were said to have perished. Ancient Greece had not known a natural disaster as devastating in more than 1,000 years, when an exploding volcano destroyed much of the island of Thera, modern Santorini. The Helike catastrophe, some scholars speculate, may have inspired Plato's story of Atlantis, a land that supposedly sank to the bottom of the sea.

For several centuries after the disaster, writers like Pliny, Strabo and Ovid reported that the ruins could still be seen on the sea floor, just offshore. Then all traces of Helike disappeared. Here was another "lost" city to challenge the sleuthing instincts of archaeologists.

In excavations this summer, Greek and American researchers uncovered what they think is the first evidence pointing to the location of Helike (pronounced ha-LEE- key). After 12 years of searching, mostly offshore and invariably in vain, they began digging on a coastal plain near the town of Aigion, 45 miles northwest of Corinth. Some of their first trenches yielded stones of a paved road and building walls, classical ceramics and a bronze coin, which was minted in the late 5th century B.C.

"It's just a glimpse," one of the researchers, Dr. Steven Soter of the American Museum of Natural History, said in an interview. "But it's the first strong evidence for Helike that is consistent with descriptions in ancient accounts."

Soter and Dr. Dora Katsonopoulou, an archaeologist and president of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, reported the discovery at a recent conference of archaeologists in Greece. Though Soter is a planetary scientist, his research on earthquakes drew him into the search for Helike in collaboration with Katsonopoulou.

Soter directed the use of remote- sensing technology like magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar in surveying buried terrain where the city was thought to be located. These surveys, followed by the sinking of scores of bore holes, located ancient ceramic fragments and other evidence of human occupation over an area of about one square mile. Digging among the orchards and vineyards of modern villages, archaeologists reached layers of sediment 10 feet deep bearing classical pottery along with seashells and other marine remains.

In their reports, the researchers said these findings suggested that the pavement and wall stones were from the time of Helike's destruction and supported stories that the city ruins were for a long time submerged in the sea or a lagoon. The ruins had been buried by silt, which, combined with a general uplifting of the land, had left the once-submerged site about half a mile inland from the present shore. A house built on the shore between the Selinous and Kerynites Rivers in the 1890s is now about 1,000 feet from the sea.

"It's a very important find in classical studies," said Dr. Robert Stieglitz, an archaeologist and classics professor at Rutgers University at Newark. "These are definitely signs of a settlement. Now they need to expand the excavations to look for the temple and theater and other public buildings that should be at the core of a city like Helike."

As a measure of his confidence that the site of Helike has been found, Stieglitz said he would join the expanded excavations next summer.

Soter and Katsonopoulou said the discovery of paving stones from a buried road might be especially rewarding. So far, only a short segment of the road's cobbles and boundary boulders have been uncovered, but enough to tantalize archaeologists.

"We think the road may be the best thing we could find," Soter said. "This could lead us to the rest of the city. And it could provide a relatively undisturbed 'time capsule' from the classical period of Greece."

On the other hand, Soter acknowledged, the earthquake and tsunami, a towering sea wave, might have left few recognizable ruins. Scientists suspect that a strong earthquake set off a submarine landslide, which in turn produced the tsunami. Aftershocks of the quake could have caused the landscape to collapse, perhaps sinking below sea level. And a tsunami, perhaps more than 35 feet high, could have swept away most of the remains.

But digging deeper and wider at the likely site of Helike will probably be irresistible to archaeologists seeking to learn more about public and private life during the golden age of Greece.

At the time of Helike's destruction, Plato was teaching and Aristotle was a boy of 12. Socrates and Aristophanes had died at the beginning of the century.

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